Miss Anthony is a fine public speaker, choosing her words daintily from the pure Anglo-Saxon, and her voice is just the kind an orator would desire. Another woman arises to address the audience. It is Mrs. Josephine S. Griffing, so long identified with the Freedmen’s Bureau. A fine-faced, sweet-voiced, elegant woman. You feel that she is thoroughly in earnest. You seem to know that she is the last one who would seek notoriety. You feel that you are listening to a woman who has to fight the battle of life for herself and little ones alone. In the depths of your heart you realize that it is such as she who breathe the breath of life into this unpopular cause; and her well-chosen words sink into your soul like dew in the honeyed corolla of a flower. If space would admit, other pictures might be added, but these shall be reserved for another day. OLIVIA. MRS. GRANT’S TUESDAY AFTERNOONS. JESSIE BENTON FREMONT AMONG THE NOTABLES IN THE BLUE ROOM. WASHINGTON, _January 31, 1871_. The fashionable season at the capital is in the full meridian of glory. Every working day of the week is devoted by the beau monde to dissipation. Feminine faces seamed with the scars of sleepless nights are the rule, and plump, rosy cheeks the exception. All is glare, glitter and pomp, and nothing home-like and substantial. One social gathering is like another, except that the women change their dresses; but the ideas afloat upon all occasions are precisely the same. An exhibition of the weather takes place every day, consequently one topic of conversation can not be exhausted. Another subject, as Bret Harte would say, “never peters out.” Women who go to receptions must be “dressed;” consequently the taste, the quality, the cost of each other’s costumes afford endless food for comment. Whilst the season lasts there is no time for reading, sensible conversation, or reflection. The fashionable wife of a Senator has not time to rest her corporeal frame before a fresh demand is made upon her nervous and vital forces. In other cities of the Union the mansions of the opulent and hospitable are thrown open because the host and hostess desire to see their guests. In Washington this order of things is reversed. Entertainments are official instead of social, and the magnificent card reception of a Cabinet minister is as cold and formal as a President’s levee. Receptions of every kind seem to be cast in the same cruel and relentless mould. Whilst it is not expected that President Grant should stop the ceremonies of a levee to introduce Jones to Brown, it would seem that a Senator’s wife, at an afternoon reception in her own little, quiet parlor at a boarding-house or hotel, would make her two or three guests acquainted for the time being, even though these women were foes ever after. But no introductions take place. The hostess must be a wonderful woman to keep three shuttles of conversation going without occasionally breaking threads. On account of these difficulties many